Miles from Nowhere

Teenager Joon leaves a shattered home for a shattering life on New York City's streets. A novel revolving around addiction, exploitation, and desperation could be described with many harrowing terms, but this audiobook holds the word "beautiful" foremost in its grip. Ali Ahn's performance is superb; her delicate voice keeps Joon sweet despite deep character flaws. Mun's prose is often breathtaking as she paints grim portraits of Joon, her cohorts, and the streets themselves. Ahn navigates shifts in time and voice with ease, changing her delivery to accommodate those drifting through Joon's orbit. The subject matter often makes this difficult to listen to, but Mun's artful style and Ahn's sympathetic voice make it more difficult to turn the audiobook off until it is over. L.B.F. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

September 1, 2008
Mun's first novel is a 1980s urban odyssey in which Joon-Mee, a 12-year-old Korean-American, leaves her troubled Bronx family for the life of a New York City runaway. The novel follows Joon over six years, as she lives in a homeless shelter, finds work as an underage escort and a streetwalker, succumbs to drug addiction and petty crime, then tries to turn it all around. Along the way we meet a cast of addicts, grifters and homeless people, including Wink, a boisterous but vulnerable young street veteran (“I didn't even know they had boy prostitutes”); Knowledge, a friend who ropes Joon into helping steal her family's Christmas tree; and Benny, a drugged-up orderly and self-destructive love interest. Mun is careful not to lean on the '80s ambience, and Joon's voice, purged of self-pity, sounds clear and strong on every page. Individual scenes, including Joon's first john, her interview with an antagonistic employment counselor and her climactic encounter with a good-hearted former neighbor, are wonderfully written. Unfortunately, the novel's episodic structure prevents Joon's story from building to anything greater than its parts.